Issue #39

August 20, 2018

Letter from the Editor

In Issue #39 of Mud Season Review, ink on paper drawings by featured artist Jaleeca Yancy explore the “abstract beauty of the black body, mind, and spirituality.” The goal is to “encourage hope and creativity” despite the social and economic systems designed to suppress. The drawings ask the viewer to linger – each face recognizable yet positioned to make you think twice about what you’re seeing, and how it fits with the image as a whole. How does the individual intersect with the collective? How can art inform our lived experience?

Our featured fiction piece for Issue #39 also asks readers to contemplate the nature of creativity. Through a story that follows the main character through a playwriting workshop with a mentor who both intimidates and inspires, Rosanna Staffa illustrates the mysterious ways pain informs the creative process.

Nonfiction author Peter Galligan writes a powerful piece about his daughter, who was born with spina bifida. His complex portrayal of her strength and resilience, combined with his nuanced exploration of the mourning process (“I’ve grown weary of mourning the loss of things that never belonged to me,” he says) offers insight into what it means to be alive and to love.

Our poetry portfolio for this issue features haunting pieces from Kristin Macintyre. There’s pain and isolation in her poems – a turning away from the world – at the same time there’s a relentless onslaught of beauty. Life will be there waiting, always:

Our mission

We seek to celebrate the full process of artistic creation, from inspiration to publication—welcoming into our open and collaborative community wide-ranging voices that tramp and track in the mud of human experience.